meed

A meed is a well-deserved compensation or reward. At a birthday party, every guest hopes to gather his or her meed of candy from the piñata they've worked so hard to smash open.

The noun meed is a very old fashioned way to talk about a payment or share of something. You're most likely to come across it in older books, but you might want to use it to describe the way your grandmother manages to give each of her twelve grandchildren a meed of her attention and love. Meed comes from the Old English root mēd, which has a Proto-Indo-European root in common with the Greek misthos, or "reward."